Enforced statelessness

The vast majority of stateless people do not choose to be that way.

There are many reasons why people become stateless – or are born that way. They include conflicting nationality laws, states becoming newly independent and the legacy of colonisation.

Here are four cases that illustrate the problems that arise when you lose the protection of a state.

Undocumented lives


CAMEROON

Doris has lived as an asylum seeker in Germany since 2012. Her only means of identification – an Ausweis in German – is a Refugee Travel Document. This flimsy blue piece of paper is a substitute for a passport of the state from which she has fled. At the moment, Doris must renew her Ausweis every two weeks. Her right to asylum has yet to be recognized.

In 2016, authorities attempted to deport Doris twice. She resisted the first attempt by stripping naked. Rather than return to violence back home, Doris says: “I prefer to hang myself…I prefer to die.” Since she was labelled uncooperative by German authorities, Doris alleges their second attempt at deporting her turned violent.


MEXICO

There are more than 10 million stateless people globally, according to official estimates. Alejandro’s mother is one of them. Because of a lack of documentation, she is now in a nursing home in Mexico even though she has two sons who are US citizens. On paper she has the right to US citizenship, but in practice she can’t prove her identity. This means she must live separately from her family.


The search for identity

Berzan is from Kurdistan. His family, living in North Syria, belong to a group of 150,000 Kurds who lost their citizenship after the 1962 Syrian census, when Kurdish people were registered as foreigners. For this reason, Berzan was born without a nationality.

Anil belongs to the Nepalese minority in Bhutan and was born without nationality. He was only five years old when ethnic conflict broke out in Bhutan and the Nepali-speaking population in the south of the country had to flee. After Anil’s father died in the conflict, his uncle took him to Nepal where he could go to school.


How many are stateless?

There are estimated to be as many as 15 million stateless people globally. But only 3.5 million have been officially counted, across 80 countries.

Three quarters of them live in just five countries:

  1. Myanmar
  2. Côte d’Ivoire
  3. Thailand
  4. Zimbabwe
  5. Latvia

The limits of statelessness statistics

Official statistics on statelessness are limited. They do not describe the full scale of the issue.

  • Not all countries are included: Official statistics only include data from 80 of the 193 UN member states. The estimate of 10 million stateless people worldwide is based on an extrapolation from the 3.5 million known to be stateless.
  • Not everyone without a country is counted as stateless: The figure of 10 million refers to those who fall under the UNHCR’s statelessness protection mandate. In addition to this, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) estimated that at the end of 2013 there were also around 1.5 million stateless refugees and around 3.5 million stateless Palestinians worldwide. This would bring the global total to around 15 million.
  • Stateless people are very difficult to count: Data gaps, inconsistencies in the way people are counted, and differences in the definitions of statelessness between nations all blur the picture. In some European countries there is a problem of persons being reported as holding an ‘unknown nationality’, which further obscures the true number affected by statelessness.

CASE STUDIES

[ssba]